Information technology is viewed as a potent force in transforming social, economic, and political life across the globe. Today, without being plugged into the information age, there is little chance for countries or regions to develop. Of course all is not hunky dory about the IT revolution; the celebrated potential of IT is remote from the realities of many. And even among information have-nots, a significant majority are women from developing countries. Says Swasti Mitter, deputy director of the United Nations University Institute for New Technologies, "Technological innovations become commercially successful if and when the creator of the innovation could make use of political, economic and legal networks. Thus the dominant group in a society determines the shape and direction of a society’s techno-economic order - and the image of an inventor has almost always been male. Lack of access to relevant networks in the public domain explains the historical marginalization of women’s contribution to technological innovations."

Gender concerns in the diffusion of IT have assumed global significance today. A valuable addition to the body of work on gender and information technology is a document by Nancy Hafkin and Nancy Taggart, titled "Gender, Information Technology, and Developing Countries: An Analytic Study". The authors remark, "Most women within developing countries are in the deepest part of the divide - further removed from the information age than the men whose poverty they share. If access to and use of these technologies is directly linked to social and economic development, then it is imperative to ensure that women in developing countries understand the significance of these technologies and use them. If not, they will become further marginalized from the mainstream of their countries and of the world."

So what prevents women from having a share in the pie? While poverty is a gender neutral attribute affecting the access of men and women equally to the gains from technology, several gender-specific antecedents impede women’s access of IT: apart from literacy and education, social and cultural norms that constrain women’s mobility and access to resources as well as women’s are huge obstacles.

Science and technology education is necessary for women to work in IT at the level of computer programmers, engineers, systems analysts, and designers. Women’s low enrolment in science impedes this globally. In developing countries, there is a great deal of variation in the percentages of women in natural sciences, computer science, and engineers. For example, women comprise between 30 and 50 percent of students in computer science and other natural sciences in a number of developing countries. Africa remains the area of greatest concern, however, as African women have the lowest participation rates in the world in science and technology education at all levels. The masculine image attributed to science and technology in curriculum and media is a universal phenomenon. Few women are producers of information technology, whether as Internet content providers, programmers, designers, inventors, or fixers of computers. In addition, women are also conspicuously absent from decision-making structures in information technology in developing countries.

That women Net users in developing countries are not representative of women in the country as a whole, but restricted to part of a small, urban educated elite, is illustrative of the layered character of the digital divide—in this sense, there are many divides and poor women are at the lowest rung of the tech ladder. According to UN statistics, in many developing countries, less than one percent of the population, male or female, has Internet access. By regions, women are 22 percent of all Internet users in Asia, 38 percent of those in Latin America, and 6 percent of Middle Eastern users. No regional figures by sex are available for Africa.

Women in the New Economy
The new economy offers many possibilities for IT-enabled businesses that women can establish or in which they can work. Most numerous are the service jobs outsourced by major corporations in the U.S. and Europe. At the low end of the skill level and largest in number are jobs in data entry and data capture. Software programming, GIS, and systems analysis jobs require much higher skills and education, but women are moving into these jobs in several developing countries. Research by women scholars like Nancy Hafkin, cited earlier, suggest that while the business-to-consumer e-commerce area has generated a great deal of excitement, it can be a difficult field to enter. Women’s handicrafts can find niche markets, but marketing and management skills are needed, and supply and delivery problems must be addressed. Some successful developing country e-businesses have targeted their diaspora markets and taken advantage of local delivery. More profitable opportunities exist for women’s small-scale enterprises in business-to-business and business-to-government markets.

The macro picture globally does not portend completely beneficial trends for women. Gayathri V and Piush Antony, researching women employees in call centres observe that in India, women tend to be concentrated in end-user, lower skilled IT jobs related to word processing or data entry and make up small percentages of managerial, maintenance and design personnel in networks, operating systems or software. Jobs have also been created for women in particular divisions of the call centre industries such as information processing, banking, insurance, finance, printing and publishing where skilled requirements are relatively lower than in software development. Further, within these service sectors, the major employment for women is in information processing jobs, particularly involving data entry.

Experts opine that for employment in core sector information technology jobs, women in developing countries need to acquire the necessary training to move into more technical, better-paying, cognitively oriented jobs. While degrees in science and technology are the entry tickets to the higher end of using and producing information technology, women can master many aspects of computer use and maintenance with much less training, with much of it available outside the formal education system.

Will IT work for poor women? A look at the employment quotient for women

Many practitioners in the field of social development feel that even as the employment potential for women in the IT industry comes with concerns as discussed above, the fact remains that IT does offer new possibilities for women. The Delhi based Datamation Consultants Pvt. Ltd., provides disadvantaged women from socially and economically disadvantaged backgrounds job opportunities after completion of IT training. Datamation works with local non-profit partners like Nari Raksha Samiti (NRS), Prayas, Action India, Nanhi Kali, Katha, Arise & Shine Church International, Deepalaya, Udayan, Help Care Society, Azim Premji Foundation, the American India Foundation, who offer free or low-cost six-to-eight-month IT training courses to marginalized groups of women, and recruits successful trainees for full-time jobs within the company.

The recruitment is based on a rigorous testing process. Datamation feels committed to hiring women but places emphasis on the requisite skills and capabilities to succeed on the job.

Since the overall goal of the program is women’s empowerment and personal development, the Datamation Foundation also provides life skills training in topics such as healthcare, communication skills, professionalism and work ethic, and knowledge of worker’s and women’s rights.

An ongoing mentoring and training system has also been established to ensure the continued success of new employees.

Mentoring focuses on professional etiquette, stress management, communication skills, life skills, and new developments in technology as they relate to their jobs. Mentoring has been seen to play a critical role in employee retention and success.

Of Datamation’s nearly 2000 employees, 35% are women, and 85% of those women are from disadvantaged backgrounds. Over the next few years, Datamation expects to add over 3000 additional jobs, with a significant percentage of those available to successful graduates of the training courses from non-profits.

Datamation is an example of how a business model within the IT sector can accelerate social development. "Datamation’s social investment efforts expand the traditional definitions of corporate responsibility and corporate citizenship. Our investment in training provides significant benefit to the workers, while also helping to ensure that the company has a strong, skilled workforce", says Chetan Sharma, the Executive Director of the organization.

For the NGOs, and for the many women who get trained, the responsiveness of business to social goals is a much-needed step. Employment brings new spaces for women in the public domain and job opportunities within the IT industry is perceived by many women as remunerative. While there are irrefutable economic gains for women, the nature of the IT industry poses some key challenges. The stress of low-end, repetitive jobs, the absence of job security, the lack of scope for career growth, the absence of worker unions etc. is well documented, and are part of the problem.

For many women from disadvantaged backgrounds the English language poses additional hurdles, and training per se may not meet the requirements of the industry. Where then does this leave non-English speaking aspirants from economically disadvantaged backgrounds? The experience of SITA, an ambitious and innovative initiative has some interesting pointers.

The Delhi based SITA - Studies in Information Technology Applications project was launched in the year 1998 by Dr.K.Sane, with funding from World Banks’s InfoDev - to provide computer skills training to poor and disadvantaged women. SITA’s aim was to empower low-income women from rural, suburban and urban areas, through computer training, customized to meet the demands of both the public and private sectors. Women from two geographical regions, the Union Territory of Delhi and the adjacent state of Haryana, were targeted by this project.

The SITA training package enabled intensive hands-on computer training with multi-lingual, audio-visual and interactive multimedia modules for self-learning Wherever possible, trainees were also attached to a potential employer. A majority of the trainees involved in the project achieved commendable proficiency in basic computer skills.

SITA experienced a financial crisis in the year 2001, after Infodev support ended. At this point, Khalsa College (Delhi University) stepped in to provide the much-needed infrastructural support and facilitated SITA’s interaction with the UN Asia-Pacific Centre for Technology Transfer (APCTT) based in Delhi. APCTT played an important role in the identification of ‘internship’ as an intermediate step in the process of securing jobs for SITA’s women. The SITA women also set up a cooperative called Mitra Mandal to take up job assignments.

Mitra Mandal is however, finding it difficult to perform as envisioned. Mukul Ahmad of APCTT says, "The most important thing that MM (Mitra Mandal) needs is marketing. Everyone in MM was trained in IT, but there was no component developed to market the training. With the lack of confidence that comes from social & economic deprivation, marketing became a problem for those trained. Also, women’s lack of proficiency in the English language, no PR workers from among them and their own socio economic situations have come in the way of anything permanent & meaningful for them."

For the SITA-Mitra mandal endeavour, the poor response of the labour market to the trainees has been a disappointing experience. The inability of a majority of women to find jobs shows that good education by itself does not serve the needs of the individuals from the disadvantaged sector, since only a handful of the 500 women trained by SITA have a job. Another unanticipated difficulty was the inability of the trainees to find stable employment. That is, they got jobs but failed to keep them for various reasons. Notable amongst them being poor communication skills particularly in English given that most of the trainees had studied in government-run Hindi-medium schools; low confidence levels caused by a tradition that regarded a girl as a liability; lack of family support given that low-income families are not able to afford domestic help, baby sitters, etc. The women that SITA caters to, have to do work at home even if they work outside with very little support from the men in their households.

This proved wrong the premise that an effective IT training for jobs was enough to enable individuals to find jobs and build their own future. SITA has demonstrated that this is inapplicable for most of persons from a disadvantaged background, particularly women. Furthermore, the SITA experience has shown that giving these women IT training alone may do more harm than good as it breeds frustration through unfulfilled expectations that end up by adding to the alienation and disillusionment.

The Datamation case has proved that economically disadvantaged women do certainly possess the capabilities to qualify on the job. However, training initiatives per se, not linked to the employment market, come with stumbling blocks. If the benefits of IT have to trickle down to poor women, the larger institutional framework of the IT industry has to make spaces for the poor in general, and poor women in particular. The story of SITA elucidates the need for a more pro-active policy in public and private institutions towards induction and mentoring of socially disadvantaged women.

TEL-NEK…each one teaches many!
Tel-Nek is a not for profit project started in May 2001 in Bidadi, a small town, 35 kms from Bangalore. The project is mainly funded by the Basque Autonomous Community through its Cooperative for Development Fund (FOCAD). In India, the 3 partners of the Tel-Nek project are Anchorage, a social development organization, 3SEI an organization created by the Government of India and the European Commission to promote the software industry in Europe and India and Suvidya, an NGO working in the area of education, both ICT and otherwise.

Tel-Nek´s main objective is to foster community growth through training semi rural women in New Information and Communication Technologies (NICT). This project, is part of a bigger vision – e-MITRA, (emerging Models of Information Technology for Rural Applications) which envisages to bridge the digital divide and use ICT as the backbone to bring about rejuvenation and empowerment of the local community.

The total strength of trainees in the first batch who have just completed the course has been 31 in all, with 26 female trainees.

The courses being taught are: Windows basics, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint, MS Access, PageMaker, Coral Draw, Graphic Designing etc, local language software like Nudi, Baraha, i-Leap along with IT security, a subject called ‘computers and society’, hardware basics, e-mail, Internet. The training course is done in Kannada, the local language, and teaching manuals are also in the same language. Two of the trainers, Ms. Pratibha and Mr. Kartik have innovatively modified available material (from Spain) to create an effective training program. Additional courses on personality development and English language skills have just been started by Tel-Nek, and the trainees recognise this as a value-addition. Tel-Nek feels that it is crucial for these trainees to have knowledge of the English language to compete and find a secure foothold in the job market.

One interesting teaching method adopted by Tel-Nek involves giving the trainees the task of typing translated Kannada articles of social significance published in local newspapers. The students are also made to do projects in the field during the training period. Surbhi Sharma, Trustee, Anchorage, says, "In order to stress upon the development aspect of our work among the students, as well as to provide them with greater understanding of their immediate demography and community, we held two different kinds of activities, a demographic survey, where the students visited and documented different aspects/places in their villages. For example, someone made a Powerpoint presentation on their village’s water tank, another on a school, someone else on the PHC, etc. The second activity was "Project week"  - where the trainees went into the villages, collected house to house survey data etc. and then this data was represented by the teams in excel sheets, as graphs, etc."

Also, the trainees are made to sign an agreement at the time of joining the course, promising to use the training imparted to them to help and assist the community with their knowledge from the computer course and not merely use it for commercial purposes. Each One Teach One (EOTO) is a programme whereby one trainee teaches someone from her/his immediate family or neighbourhood the basics of the computer. Visibly excited, many young women who have completed the first batch declare, "On Saturdays, we bring along our brothers and sisters to the training centre."

Tel-Nek has so far been involved in assignments completed with the aid of Teleworking. Surbhi Sharma says, "We were able to persuade 2 organisations to utilise our services for their needs. Ramana Maharishi Academy for the blind is a not-for-profit organisation in Bangalore. They needed electronic versions of school textbooks (in English) for their children, after which they would convert them into Braille. Tel-Nek centre took up the assignment and completed it successfully. Impressed with the quality of our work, they gave us 2 additional assignments. i-Vista Digital Solutions is a software company located in Bangalore. They were seeking assistance in the conversion of a client’s site into Kannada. We approached them, offered our services and subsequently completed the assignment. They have assured us of repeat order in future."

Recently, the Delhi based Datamation India Pvt. Ltd outsourced a part of their ration card conversion project, along with the government of Karnataka, to Tel-nek. A team of 7 trainees executed the work.  Tel-Nek is keen on providing its current trainees, especially women, with employment that involves Teleworking. As per the suggestion of T-BAG (Tel-Nek Betterment Advisory Group), universities as well as publishing houses will be approached to seek digitisation of Kannada books for these trainee women. "Efforts to promote teleworking have been on throughout the project period. Since this is a new concept, it takes extra effort to convince the users on its benefits," remarks Surbhi.

Directions for the future
According to Surbhi, the last one-and-a-half years has been a learning experience in more than one-way. For the second batch starting 2nd June onwards, Tel-nek intends to offer a basic as well as an advanced course, as the experience has been that not all trainees have an aptitude for courses like the Coral Draw and the PageMaker, so far part of the curriculum of the basic course.

Future plans include the setting up of a Tele-centre in the Bidadi area, by hiring a building, and IT infrastructure, with five competent women trainers. The Tele-centre would provide facilities in training, data entry, and also double up as an Internet café. The setting up cost of the Tele-centre is estimated to be at $12,000. The Azim Premji Foundation has shown a keen interest in placing these trainees in the computer learning centers run by the Foundation. However, distance is proving to be a hurdle in placing the Tel-Nek trainees, who live far away from the centers of APF. With about 500 students applying for the course this year, the response to the project has been immense. Ratna, a trainee from Jalamangala village near Bidadi says that the computer course has done a world of good to her confidence. Some of the other women trainees remarked that many of them were earlier disallowed from even switching on their Television sets at home, today command far more respect at home after having started the computer course.

IT & social and political empowerment
For women, IT has opened new vistas in social and political empowerment. What IT can do for women’s rights is visible in some milestones – both global and local. Women activists from the world over have networked successfully, thanks to the Internet, to bring their agenda to world conferences of the UN in the past few years. The possibilities that networking brings translates into significant political gains for women. Through web sites, mailing lists and e-commerce, women in different regions have attempted to appropriate the benefits of information society to advance their social, political and economic agenda. In fact, advocacy for gender issues in ICT first gained a foothold during the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. Women’s organizations successfully lobbied for the recognition of the need for women to be involved in decision-making regarding the development of new technologies in order to participate fully in their growth and impact.

In 1999, ASAFE in Africa, an organization with women members who are small entrepreneurs, organised the first-ever training session in the region to familiarise members with e-commerce. Similarly, Famafrique is a women’s electronic network launched in 1998 in Francophone Africa that seeks to strengthen the presence and visibility of the women’s movement in French-speaking Africa on the Internet. The Asian Women’s Resource Exchange is an online network that seeks to facilitate the sharing of information resources between organizations in the Asian region. It has a mailing list and a web site that is a shared multi-lingual index database with a search engine. For women repressed and silenced by dictatorial regimes, the Internet has provided a space to find their voice and share their experiences. Rumpun email Perempuan is a case in point that has allowed Indonesian women activists a space to come together. The association for Progressive Communication – Women’s Networking Support Programme has documented these stories to illustrate the myriad ways in which women have deployed technology for promoting their interests and rights the world over.

In India, Delhi-based Nari Raksha Samiti, founded fifty years ago to help women in distress, focuses on promoting the safety and security of women, family welfare, employment, health, and training in job-oriented professions. Under the leadership of Vandana Sharma, NRS established a small computer education centre and volunteers have trained 250 young women, many of them with a history of oppression, in basic computer literacy as well as office software such as Excel, Word, and Power Point. This IT training program is part of the strategy to enable women who are dowry victims and have a history of harassment and exploitation, to find employment and economic independence. The NRS computer centres not only provide job training, but have also allowed NRS to establish an online complaint system for solving dowry and family dispute issues.

Women can confidentially lodge complaints through the system and receive assistance from NRS, the police and government authorities.

Datamation Foundation (set up by Datamation Consultants) has initiated a campaign against members of the medical community indulging in selective sex determination tests in India as well as against the selective abortion of female foetuses in contravention of the law and natural justice. "Save the Girl Child campaign" uses Information & Communication Technologies (ICTs) innovatively and has a dedicated web site for the Campaign (http://www.indiafemalefoeticide.org/.). The web site not only covers the regulatory aspects, but also includes a complaint lodging process. This process protects the identity of the complainant as well as provides an effective vehicle for the booking of the doctors, maternity homes, ultra-sound and radiology clinics, conducting illegal sex-determination tests. The complaints are retrieved into a database format at Datamation, from where they are handed over to the competent authority for further action at their end. The responses from the authorities are also sent back to Datamation to enable updating of the database within a month’s time, failing which, an automatic reminder for the competent authority gets published.

Plans to sensitise people from rural areas on sex-selective abortions include the use of internet radio and internet video. Staff and volunteers of Datamation Foundation are also taking the Campaign to rural areas using a portable computer mart called a "computer thela". The equipment is taken to the Panchayat level for the dissemination of information about the site. More than 750 cases of selective sex-determination tests and consequent illegal abortion of the female foetuses have been registered at the site. The site has been linked to other women’s rights web-sites across the country-such as Nanhi Kali, Nari Raksha Samiti, Nari Dakshata Samiti etc. to draw enhanced traffic as well as to enable tracking of individual complaints effectively.

An important area that information technology can contribute to is the political empowerment of women, acting as a tool that supports social and political advocacy, to strengthen women’s participation in the political process, to improve the performance of elected women officials, to improve women’s access to government and its services, to educate, and to disseminate indigenous knowledge. IT can be particularly useful in increasing the transparency and accountability of government, an application from which women can particularly profit. Of course, these processes need to be ably supported by the mobilisation of women, a task that is imperative for IT to acquire social relevance.

The ability to take advantage of IT
Information technology can offer significant opportunities for all girls and women in developing countries, including poor women living in rural areas. However, their ability to take advantage of these opportunities is contingent upon many things. Gender concerns need to be included in national IT policy. Also, gender and development policy makers need to be sensitized to IT issues, so that they can take an informed position in the process of policy formulation and implementation. Extension of infrastructure, particularly wireless and satellite communications, to rural areas and peri-urban areas is crucial to increasing women’s access to information technology. Emphasis needs to be on common use facilities, such as telecenters, and other forms of public access in places convenient and accessible to women.

The single-most important factor in improving the ability of girls and women in developing countries to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by information technology is education, at all levels from literacy through scientific and technological education. Also, exposure to technology at early stages of education is vital. Beyond access to basic education, girls and women must be equipped with skills to prepare them for a range of roles in information technology as users, creators, designers, and managers.

The United Nations places access to information technology as the third most important issue facing women globally, after poverty and violence against women. The convening of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) provides the impetus for a review of national ICT policies globally. The Summit will take place at the end of this year in Geneva and a Gender Caucus has been formed to bring to the platform key concerns for women in IT.

It is essential that gender issues be considered early in the process of the introduction of information technology in developing countries so that gender concerns can be incorporated from the beginning and not as a corrective after thought. Many people dismiss the concern for gender and IT in developing countries on the basis that development should deal with basic needs first.

However, it is not a choice between one and the other. If lessons from pilots are distilled, IT can be an important tool in meeting women’s basic needs and can provide the access to resources to lead women out of poverty.

RESHMI SARKAR
The author contributed this piece to DATAQUEST and is the program coordinator of IT for Change, a non-profit organization in Bangalore. ITfC supports the info-communication needs of other NGOs and undertakes research on the social dimensions of ICTs.